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HomeAppliance: Input Devices & Control

Input Devices 1. Overview

Keyboard

The keyboard has 105 (or more) keys: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, special characters, plus TAB, CTRL, ALT, RETURN, INS, DEL, HOME, END, PAGE UP, PAGE DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, UP, DOWN, ESC, F1-F12 Support: via X11 key-bindings. Binding: direct key bindings Focus: via TAB (next), SPACE (next), CURSOR LEFT (prev), CURSOR RIGHT (next) Action: Button: RETURN, Slider: PAGE DOWN or '-' or ',' (down), PAGE UP or '=' or '.' (up)

Mouse

Mouse has three buttons, plus X,Y coordinates. Support: via X11. Focus: via X,Y (mouseOver) Action: Button: mouse button, Slider: move mouse (til release)

IR Remote Control

Remote control has as minimum: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Volume Up, Volume Down, Program Up, Program Down, Switch Device (Tape, Radio, Video) Support: via LIRC. Binding: direct key bindings Focus: via PRG UP (next), PRG DOWN (prev) Action: Button: "0", Slider: Volume Up (up), Volume Down (down) Hardware: your existing TV remote-control, receiver (to be researched) IRMan IR receiver to PC (serial)

Touch Screen

Touch-Screen: same functionality as mouse, with exception only one button. Support: via X11 (XFree86 supports Elo: Linux-support) Binding: behaves like the mouse Focus: direct Action: push screen Hardware: EloTouch.Com ELO touchscreen (various tech. approaches) TrollTouch.Com CRT touchscreen (+ add-ons)

Voice

Voice-control: english spoken words, and entire sentences via microphone. Support: via ViaVoice for Linux developed by IBM. Binding: certain words (e.g. "RADIO", "VIDEO", "TV" etc) Focus: word "NEXT" (next), word "PREVIOUS" (prev) Action: Button: "ACTION", Slider: "UP" (up), "DOWN" (down) Hardware: Microphones: Labtec LVA-7280 ClearVoice Digital Microphone ~ $130 Andrea Desktop array DA-400 ~$150

Input Devices 2. Implementation

The challenge lies within the inter-operateability of all input-devices, or in a nutshell, all input-devices should be able to feed the UI (User Interface). For simplicity we assume all is event-driven, no polling.

In general we have two ways to access the controls, FocusWalking and DirectBinding.

Direct Binding

Most actions are binded to certain events, and each event is connected to one of the input-devices. Certaintly X11 has powerful input-device support, but the IR remote control, as well the Voice control aren't implemented (and won't I guess). A decision has to be made: using X11 entirely as app-layer, or developing something on top? X11 provides focus-setting, and is by event-driven anyway. For now the IR- and Voice-control will be implemented 'aside' of the X11 events (mouse, keyboard, touchscreen). This means, all developed apps require X11 to run, which might be a wise decision, maybe not - let's see. Most common action should preferable attached to certain direct buttons, keys or words depending on the input device.

Focus Walking

Each control can have a focus, and a certain action activates it. For more complex tasks this way should be chosen.